As networks have grown and become more complex due to technologies like convergence and virtualization, STP has proved to be inefficient. The indirect paths that a spanning tree contains cause data (or migrated VMs) to be routed through more network “hops,” adding latency into the storage environment. This concentration of traffic through the subset of available links that form the tree reduces effective network bandwidth and increases latency. Finally, blocked paths represent unused bandwidth, which only gets worse with each new generation of network hardware. Now, with FCoE bringing more storage traffic to the IP network, these problems will intensify.

The Internet Engineering Task Force’s Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links network standard applies network layer routing protocols to the link layer and, unlike STP, incorporates a knowledge of the entire network and uses that information to support Layer 2 multi-pathing. This can enable multi-hop FCoE, reduce latency and improve overall network bandwidth utilization.

Network performance and efficiency are pretty fundamental concerns for IT organizations. For a VAR, when these issues with STP come up or when the term TRILL is mentioned, some background may be very useful. For more information, take a look at the webinar on TRILL by Storage Switzerland.

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ATA, or Advanced Technology Attachment, is the system PC motherboards use to communicate with hard drives. It eliminated the disk controller card, putting its function into the hard disk drive’s interface itself with the most common version being Serial ATA, or SATA. ATA over Ethernet basically replaces the ribbon cable motherboard connection ATA drives had with an Ethernet cable.

Unlike iSCSI, which encapsulates SCSI commands into IP packets and routes them over a LAN or the Internet, ATA over Ethernet doesn’t use IP addresses or IP packets but instead uses MAC addresses to identify the target device. It also uses the lighter ATA protocol instead of SCSI. AoE packets do pass through an Ethernet switch but at a “layer” below the IP protocol, so they’re not routable. It’s essentially a direct connection between a server and a disk drive, just like it was when the drive was physically inside the server.

AoE provides a very inexpensive technology for creating networked storage. It’s open source, but vendors do support it in storage arrays. For VARs, it can be a low-cost alternative to iSCSI or just another point of interest to generate appointments. ATA over Ethernet may be that disruptive solution you need to get into an account that’s buying storage from another VAR.

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